30 Oct 2016 | By Gov.sg News Team
http://gov.sg
Everyone has that single sesquipedalian acquaintance who prefer to pontificate at great length over the day’s news. This usually happens when the rest of your friends would rather be talking about football.
Often, the best way to wrestle the conversation back is to out-verbose this friend. Here’s how you do it:
1. Read more!
The more you read, the more words you know. And you could start using your new vocabularied arsenal to out-verbose that sesquipedalian friend of yours.
Set aside time each day to read. It doesn’t matter when – right before you go to sleep, during your commute to work, or even while you’re on the porcelain throne. Just give yourself time to pause and smell the proses.
Reading on the trainReading on the train
2. Read widely!
Don’t limit yourself, variety is the spice of life after all. Read beyond your normal genre. Your sesquipedalian friend probably does. If you’re a fan of romance novels, try sci-fi. Or switch from fiction to non-fiction. And who knows? You might actually stumble upon a new genre you’d never thought you’d like.
3. Read together!
Friends reading togetherFriends reading together
As much as watching movies is a social activity, so is reading. Share a book you love with a friend and discuss it afterwards. Together, you might pick up on things that you missed during your first round of reading. The shared experience could also bring the both of you closer.
And with your powers combined, you might even be able wrestle away the conversation from that sesquipedalian friend.
The National Reading Movement
“Read More, Read Widely and Read Together” also happens to be the aim of the National Reading Movement by the National Library Board (NLB). One of the Movement’s initiative is to get working adults to read on the go, and the NLB is doing that in two ways.
1. Train up your reading skills on the MRT
Let us know if you’ve been on one of these trains!Let us know if you’ve been on one of these trains!
This is a cool new collaboration between NLB and the Land Transport Authority (LTA). From 24th October to 20th November this year, two trains running along the North-East and Downtown Lines will be decked up according to well-known novel genres such as mystery, fantasy, self-help and autobiography.
Besides getting you in the mood to read, these trains will actually help you find books to read. Each train will feature a QR code that links to a website with Recommended Reads.
With a list of recommended reading, that’s one less excuse for you not to start reading now.
2. Download the NLB Mobile app now!
What’s not to love about this app? You can search and read eBooks straight from the app. If you’re a libraryhead, you can also keep up with NLB’s events, or even recommend your favourite titles to NLB. For those of you that really love the books you borrow from the library and find it hard to return them, you can even pay your fines through the app.
With NLB making it easier for you to find the books you love, you’ve got fewer reasons not to read more, read widely and read together.
Find out more about the National Reading Movement at http://www.nationalreadingmovement.sg